experimental high energy physics

This post belongs to the eschaton theme. Which means a small and swift blog post just to do justice to something that can’t be made comprehensively large by any reason, at the moment.

Read the linked news article which giving excerpts from a book by the famed Martin Rees which I haven’t read, nonetheless which sound very tenuous on the scientific merit its purported to be based on, claims that particle physics experiments can create black-hole catastrophes on earth in the very unfortunate event that something goes wrong.

Here is my initial reaction to the article.

“apocalypse mongering”

Earth’s Schwarzschild radius is less than 1 cm. What that means is earth needs to be compressed into a sphere of that radius with its current given mass, for it to turn into a black-hole.

One summer 2011 evening, in the courtyard of our house, I got into the act of recording myself with my webcam, and I find that I am explaining the concept of, Time Travel — verbatim, with no prior writings.

Get yourself lost. Somewhere. So that I don’t see you.

I don’t care, I am supposed to drink this sprite or not.

But the fact is; I am wrong. well that just that one sip that’s just reminded me, something, something aesthetic something exotic in the taste of the drink.

That’s right. I just drink a lot, so I would know.

It corresponds to the past. This is time travel.

Time travel can happen in your memory, cos in quantum mechanics, where it concerns very small objects concern very small object, time travel has some meaning.

Time travel doesn’t have a meaning in classical physics, you never see the arrow of time getting reversed for the classically sized and scaled, objects, these objects never go back in time, you never see that, you never see something reversing, it goes that way and it comes back exactly the same way, not even for a single object, so this whole thing, this whole jamboree o’ objects, they can never all, at the same time, go back in the arrow of time, to produce what is called a reversal in time, reversal in motion.

You never see that in classical world. But in the quantum mechanical world, this has certain meaning. Certain meanings.

What is it?

The, quantum mechanical sized objects, particles, small particles, photons, electrons, protons, atoms, I am not even thinking of atoms, but very tiny particles, very small particles, when they are exchanging the information, their 4-vector information, their momenta, energy, this and that, what is happening there?

Particle comes and meets. You think they are meeting like, in classical object, exchanging some information, then going back and forth, then just come back and meet again? Hey .. “time travel, we are meeting once again”.

I did that gesture, in a classical way, but not in a quantum mechanical way.

In a quantum mechanical way, this is not happening, this is just one component, and no component is complete, no path is complete, no amplitude is complete, its a mix of a very different kind, in a very different type of processes, very … well, multiple processes, multiple amplitudes, multiple things happening all at the same time, it does not make sense that there is one single electron and its exchanging information with that photon or proton … this and that …

But all of them are not stable. We have made great strides in understanding them collectively called as standard model of particle physics which involves electroweak and strong interactions. Its a weird mess of beautiful list of particles and their behavior toward each other. Sometimes there is symmetry breaking sometimes there is symmetry and sometimes there is confinement.

What such an astounding theory backed by the most swashbuckling experimental measurements have meant is there are only countable number of stable particles.

Particle Physics is collectively an effort to study the exciting world of subatomic particles and the nature of their interaction. By subatomic we mean anything that happens within the atom or below and not above. The implications could cover as much above, as it would be entailed by the precincts of natural laws.

eg If a process corresponds to as big a size as is a micro-gram, its evidently not subatomic size in length dimension. The subatomic size by its definition of length scale would correspond to a femto-meters. But the given process is subatomic, while the result of having a size of micro-gram would not be.

Hence while the size of the subatomic entity can roughly be put by a femto meter, nonetheless a particle of the size of pico-meter might find relevance in the study of subatomic processes due to such eerie connections. For another matter a micro-gram is the unit of mass and not that of magnitude of distance.

The quality of a scientific paper are not ZERO if citation is zero. Perhaps we need to define two parameters, quality and significance of scientific communication. Quality; a well done research in the best traditions and methods available. Significance; the outreach of the paper to bring effect into others work and others understanding toward the subject matter.

While there will always be a downside to both parameters, citation reflects the significance (and quality as much as it correlated to significance) of a paper.